Quote:
Originally Posted by NYguy
These are some of the original streets
from back when the city
was settled by the Dutch. Some are so narrow, they are just pedestrian walkways.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/ny...c9f&ei=5087%0A
Near Ground Zero, a Mixed-Use Revival
Stone Street in Lower Manhattan has been transformed in recent years from
what one business owner described as a trash-filled alley into a booming late-
night social scene.
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
September 9, 2007
Six years ago, in the aftershock of the terrorist attack that reduced the
World Trade Center to a smoldering pile, local officials wondered whether
people would want to live or work around the financial district again.
Today, as new residents fill converted office buildings and jam the raucous
block party that erupts nightly on Stone Street, the more likely curiosity
about Lower Manhattan is: Where did all these people come from, and how
can they afford to live here?
Despite the slow pace of reconstruction at ground zero, the area below
Chambers Street is humming with activity, much of it designed to appeal to
the well-heeled professionals who are transforming the neighborhood.
Already, it has added hundreds of condominium units and hotel rooms, a
thriving restaurant row, a private school charging $27,000 a year, a free
wireless Internet service, a BMW dealership and an Hermès boutique.
A Tiffany & Company jewelry store is coming soon, and plans are in place for
the arrival of grocery stores, the type of business that the area has long lacked.
“There were very few who would have predicted that Lower Manhattan
would have rebounded as quickly as it has, despite all of the false starts and
delays and emotional overlays,” said Carl Weisbrod, president of Trinity Real
Estate and former president of the Alliance for Downtown New York. “There
were few people who were quite that optimistic.”
The rebound is a testament to the healing power of billions of dollars in
government aid, like the federal Liberty Bond program, which provided more
than $6 billion in tax-exempt financing for reconstruction downtown, as well
as various rent and wage subsidies from redevelopment agencies.
Optimism abounds now among developers and merchants, who are pouring
hundreds of millions of dollars into real estate along the narrow streets of
Lower Manhattan. They are counting on the district, in its next incarnation,
to be not just a collection of office towers and trading floors, but also a self-
sustaining residential neighborhood that will appeal to families.
Even accounting for the exodus of residents immediately
after 9/11, the population of Lower Manhattan has increased by more than
10,000 in the last six years, according to census data. To accommodate new
residents, more than 6,000 apartments have been created in the last four
years, through conversions or construction, and an additional 5,000 are
planned, according to the Downtown Alliance.
Office space, now in short supply, is renting for more than it did before 9/11.
Over the next several years, around 14 million square feet of commercial
space is scheduled to be built, replacing the offices and stores destroyed on
9/11, according to data compiled by Cushman & Wakefield, a large real
estate brokerage.
The economic rebound is indisputable, but it has left some downtown
merchants with mixed feelings.
Karena Nigale has found the new financial district to be more attractive as a
place to run a business, but less affordable as a place to live. Since 9/11,
she has opened two hair salons — each called KK Salon — within a few
blocks of the New York Stock Exchange.
Ms. Nigale started out catering to investment bankers and traders with $25
shaves and $40 haircuts. But she has expanded to serve a broader clientele,
staying open on Saturdays to serve residents of the area.
“Before, this neighborhood was operating from 8 in the morning until 5 o’clock
in the afternoon,” and on weekdays only, Ms. Nigale said. She expected her
business would soon become a seven-day-a-week operation.
Ms. Nigale lived above her first salon until the din from the carousers on
Stone Street below her windows, along with a rent increase of more than 30
percent, drove her out. Unable to afford a suitable apartment in the sizzling
downtown market, Ms. Nigale and her 11-year-old daughter decamped to the
Jersey City riverfront about a year ago.
“I need two bedrooms, and there’s nothing for less than $4,000 a month
around here,” Ms. Nigale said, speaking from the larger salon she opened on
Maiden Lane last year. A place to park would cost at least an additional $400
a month, she said.
Her business, though, is thriving. Her young customers all have “big watches,
expensive handbags,” and no qualms about the cost of her services, she said.
Indeed, the Downtown Alliance, the neighborhood’s business improvement
district, estimates that the median annual income among the households in
the financial district is $165,000, which is about triple the figure for
Manhattan as a whole.
While salons and grocers may be welcome in the neighborhood, economic
development officials argue that maintaining downtown’s position as a global
corporate center is important for the city and even the nation.
Nearly 20 million square feet of office space has been lost since 9/11, from
the destruction of the World Trade Center, the damage to the Deutsche Bank
building and the conversion of older office buildings to residential use. Still,
said William Bernstein, the acting president of the Downtown Alliance, “The
financial industries will always be the backbone of Lower Manhattan’s economy.”
A recent sign that downtown’s traditional role remains viable is the decision
this summer by JPMorgan Chase & Company to build a headquarters for its
investment bank on the site of the ruined Deutsche Bank building. The Chase
building will stand just a few blocks from where Goldman Sachs is building a
2.1-million-square-foot tower. Both are within a block of ground zero.
And 7 World Trade Center, which contains 1.7 million square feet of space, is
open and more than half leased. The other buildings planned at ground zero
would add 12 million square feet of office space in coming years.
Office rents downtown are 10 percent higher, at $45 a square foot, than six
years ago, and the vacancy rate has dropped below 7 percent, according to
data from Cushman & Wakefield.
Business owners are finding other uses for some older office buildings besides
turning them into condos. Across Broad Street from the stock exchange, a
former Bank of America building has been transformed into the Claremont Preparatory School.
Starting its third year, the school has several hundred students from
prekindergarten through eighth grade, said Michael C. Koffler, the chief
executive of MetSchools, the operator of Claremont Prep.
About 40 percent of them live downtown, and he expects that number to
grow as more apartments become available and the neighborhood gains more
stores like a Gristede’s supermarket planned on Maiden Lane and a Whole
Foods proposed for nearby TriBeCa.
“You see children in baby carriages all the time,” Mr. Koffler said. “You see
people walking dogs. There will be many more apartments with three
bedrooms, meaning the development community is acknowledging that this
will be a community of families.”
For some, the neighborhood’s growing pains have been a frustrating
disruption.
Tazz Latifi’s pet supply shop, Petropolis, sits three blocks south of ground
zero in the street-level space of an older apartment building. Since she
opened in March 2006, her business has had to weather the relentless
reconstruction of the surrounding blocks, Ms. Latifi said.
Her first unpleasant surprise came last year, when the building was emptied
for a conversion to luxury condominiums. Since then, she said, Con Edison
has dug up the street outside her shop three times. In recent weeks, some
of the local streets have been closed because of last month’s fire at the
Deutsche Bank building, in which two firefighters died.
“It’s frustrating for the residents here,” said Ms. Latifi, 38. “I have so many
customers that have moved because of the noise and the air quality.”
Peter Poulakakos has had a front-row view of the less
tangible changes through the windows of Ulysses’ pub on Stone Street and
the six other food-service businesses he and his partners operate nearby.
Talking over a standing-room-only crowd on a Thursday night in late summer,
Mr. Poulakakos recalled that the street, which was first paved in the mid-17
th century, was a trash-filled alley a decade ago.
Now, closed to traffic and lined with restaurants and bars, it is the stage for
one of the liveliest social scenes in Manhattan, a slice of South Beach tucked
into the financial district — minus the palm trees and bikinis.
Inside Ulysses’, which stays open until 4 a.m., couples were dancing to salsa
music blaring from a D.J.’s booth. Next door at Adrienne’s Pizza Bar, which
serves until midnight and was named after Mr. Poulakakos’s mother, a pair of
women were buying a $12 four-cheese pie to take home.
A belief in the downtown economy’s ability to recover from disasters,
financial and otherwise, runs in the Poulakakos family. Mr. Poulakakos’s
father, Harry, ran the Wall Street mainstay Harry’s at Hanover Square for
decades. He closed it in 2003 after his wife died, but his son and a partner
revived it as Harry’s Cafe and Steak.
In April, Peter Poulakakos took a bigger leap, opening Gold Street, a
restaurant that never closes, at the base of 2 Gold Street, a 51-story
building where two-bedroom apartments rent for as much as $5,900 a month.
“Downtown still has a ways to go, as far as progress,” Mr. Poulakakos said.
But the tide of sentiment about its prospects has clearly turned, he added.
“We get a lot of customers who used to live down here,” Mr. Poulakakos
said. “They say, ‘I wish I was living here now, because it’s so different.’ ”
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